In the late 1800s, Thanksgiving was a more subdued holiday. Quiet dinners, reflection, and often church-centric. Then, college students got involved.
College football became a thing back in the 1870s, and it didn’t take long for students to make good use of the combination of nice weather and some holiday time off from the study grind. Sounds like a perfect time to organize football games, right?
But the same logistical factors that made football games popular over Thanksgiving weekend also made it the ideal time to settle scores in college rivalries. Just to be clear, rivalries didn’t begin on the football field; they were in full force long before football came on the scene.
Harvard-Yale, for example, wasn’t just born out of an interest in football. The two schools had been bickering about everything from rowing to who was the more “gentlemanly” institution for 75% of forever. When they started playing football in 1875, all that gentlemanly rage just spilled onto the field.
Thanksgiving: When Football Became the Main Course
So we’ve got football on Thanksgiving and college rivalries being settled by the same sport. It didn’t take long for schools to gravitate towards putting these things together and scheduling their biggest contests over the national holiday.
The earliest famous Thanksgiving rivalry was Yale vs. Princeton, first played on Thanksgiving Day in 1876. Newspapers called it “The Thanksgiving Day Championship of America.” I suspect all the other schools disagreed with this characterization. To me, it sounds kinda like the Super Bowl winners calling themselves "World Champions." Did they beat Greece and Liechtenstein to win that coveted trophy?
Anyway, by the 1890s, nearly every major college was scheduling its biggest game over Thanksgiving weekend. The tradition became so ingrained that in some cities, the football game was considered more essential to the holiday than the actual meal.
Southern Football Titans Collide. And Slide.
Back in 1896, when real men wearing leather helmets (or none at all) attracted concussions like drunk uncles to Thanksgiving family dinners, Auburn and Georgia Tech were about to meet. The date was November 6, 1896. Yeah, a bit earlier than Thanksgiving weekend, but the rivalry example is too good not to share here.
Georgia Tech planned to arrive in Auburn by train. The modern “highway” distance is about 108 miles, but back then, moving a football team, even one that shunned pads and all the gear teams travel with today, was no small feat. Rail travel was the only practical choice.
So, picture the team, hopping on a train in the morning, likely wearing their wool uniforms, and heading to Auburn to play “the big game” that same afternoon.
Lubricated Curriculum: Auburn’s Most Slippery Idea
Georgia Tech is clearly an engineering-centric institution, but so is Auburn. And someone there had a whopper idea on how to prank the techies.
The night before Tech’s team arrival, Auburn students mounted a herculean effort to create the world’s longest rail-based slip and slide.
Students stockpiled all sorts of slippery ick: grease, lard, soap, and who knows what else and began the job of “greasing” the train tracks leading into, through, and past the Auburn station. No reliable sources specify how much track they managed to cover, but according to legend, it was enough to discourage Tech’s train from slowing down, much less stopping.
Picture those news videos of hapless southern drivers battling the “every ten years or so” ice storms, where their cars just do that slow-motion slide for a few hundred yards. Now, substitute a fully loaded train into your mental picture and multiply the sliding part by miles.
According to legend, the arriving train slid a full five miles past the station before managing to stop. True? Got me. Who knows exactly how far it went? Our best bet is to stick with the mileage claim passed down through generations of Auburn fans.
As if picturing the players and coaches’ faces as the train skated right on by Auburn isn’t funny enough, the real prank was yet to come.
All those Georgia Tech players had to exit the train and walk back to Auburn for the game, wool uniforms, leather helmets and all.
Apparently, the prank worked, as the fresh and rested Auburn players managed to whoop the tired Tech team 45-0. Some sources claim the score was 44-0, but does it really matter?
Historians haven’t proven that the hot-buttered-track prank directly caused the blowout, but it certainly didn’t help Georgia Tech’s morale. Nothing says “psychological warfare” quite like showing up exhausted while the other team greets you with a friendly, innocent-faced welcome. “Rough morning?”
This was too good not to memorialize, so to this day, Auburn students still commemorate the prank with the “Wreck Tech Pajama Parade.” Students march through downtown in pajamas, celebrating that glorious moment when physics and tomfoolery teamed up to deliver Auburn one of the most lopsided rivalry openers in history.
